But now he realizes that the pawn has lost further, he is still out of the

protection of the king. After
 we have a
draw. Sixth-rank defense works in similar
situations with a passed pawn on any other file
(a, b, c, ..., h).
The square rule
square. This means that White promotes the
queen after  with a
winning endgame.
Again, white king gets into a square of the
pawn, this time a smaller one (e1, c1, c3, e3).
 and he finally catches the pawn. We
have already seen that black king is out of white
pawn's square, so White safely promotes a new
queen with a winning position.

Once a chess player gets a handle on the basic

This pawn endgame serves to show one of the
most important rules of endgames with
passed pawns – the "Square rule". Both White
and Black have dangerous passed pawns.
Since neither king is positioned in front of the
pawns, the only way to prevent them from
promoting is catching them or, as chess
players like to say, "getting into their square". As
shown in the diagram, White on the move has to
get into the square of black e-pawn, which is
marked by the square with angles: 
theoretical endgames and principles, he can
proceed to mastering endgame technique. For
this, he needs to understand advanced endgame
principles. Let us name a few of them here:
schematic thinking, the principle of two
weaknesses, good and bad piece trade, king
centralization, suppressing counterplay, etc.
Many of these principles were explained in an
excellent endgame book called „Endgame
Strategy“ by Mikhail Shereshevsky. In our
endgame series, we will build upon these
principles with classical and modern examples
from endgame practice.
Let us begin with a great endgame player, the ex-
World Champion (1957-1958), Vassily Smyslov.
(see the photo below)

And White just manages to do that. The

king is now in the square of the pawn and he can
stop it.
This rule is very important to know because
otherwise White could even lose the game,
should he engage in a pawn race with
 and Black promotes the
queen with check  and wins the pawn,
so all he needs to do to win the game is to
checkmate with the queen against the king. 


Let's see what happens if Black tries to catch

white pawn. He is obviously out of the square
marked with  – –– . Taking it a move